Jenny Saville

Exhibition Hours

Like no other artist of our time, she has left postmodernism behind to reconstruct a close connection with the great European pictorial tradition, in constant discourse with the modernism of Willem de Kooning and Cy Twombly, and the portraiture of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon.

In the rooms of the Museo Novecento, between the ground floor and the first floor, an outstanding series of paintings and drawings will be exhibited. The works cover a wide period, from the early 2000s to the last few months.

Through a new window, Saville’s Rosetta II (2005–06), a monumental portrait of a young blind woman known by the artist and portrayed as a blind cantor or a mystic in ecstatic concentration, will be visible day and night, above the altar inside the former church of the Spedale. This display will create a dialogue—strongly desired and sought by the Director of the Museum—with Giotto’s wooden crucifix suspended in the center of the nave of the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, clearly visible from the outside of the churchyard when the Dominican church portal remains open

Saville’s passionate and engaging dialogue with Michelangelo’s work and iconography reaches its climax at the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, part of the monumental complex of the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore. Here, in the room with the Bandini Pietà (c. 1547–55), one of Michelangelo’s last works, will be a large drawing by Saville, about three meters tall, which she was inspired to create after a visit to Florence two years ago.

In the Museo degli Innocenti it will be installed alongside Luca della Robbia’s Madonna and Child and Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with an Angel, Saville’s large painting The Mothers (2011). The works are housed in a building designed by Brunelleschi for welcoming abandoned children and dedicated to the promotion and protection of children’s rights. A second large painting, Byzantium (2018), will be exhibited, as a different version of the Pietà.